> [Someone once did an amusing least-fixed-point exercise feeding the> output of a compiler back into the compiler until it converged. But I> suppose that's not quite the same thing. There are some rather small> Lisp-in-Lisp and Scheme-in-Scheme programs. -John]

Maurice Wilkes describes a set of bootstrapped compilers for
"WISP" with the result acceptable by the EDSAC 2 Assembly Routine. I
had fun years ago with this. The reference is: M.V.Wilkes, "An
Experiment with a Self-compiling Compiler for a Simple List-processing
Langauge", Annual Review in Automatic Programming, vol 4, pp 1-48,
1964. The paper also gives a WISP program for formal differentiation
of some simple algebraic expressions.